Welcome to my photo travel blog. I am a landscape and night photographer who conducts photography workshops in some of America’s most exotic landscapes.
I just completed a travel guide to the best landscape photography locations in Southern California, to be available in September 2015.

Bear in mind that this is a timelapse video, so in playback as video everything is dramatically sped up. Each frame is a 15 to 30 second shot, but the video is assembled at a relatively slow frame rate of only 12 shots per second, so in video formats that play at 24 to 30 frames per second, the meteors show up for roughly two frames. In other words, each second of video displays ten to twenty minutes of shooting time. Apparently our eyes and minds are quick enough for us to perceive the meteors with some persistence even though they show up for only 1/12th of a second.

Anything that travels across the screen or survives in the video for more than a brief flash is a jet or satellite (and you can't see many of the meteors in most online copies of the video, unless you follow the links to Flickr and enable the highest HD playback available there). I'll try to find video hosting sites that enable blogging of copies that offer higher resolution playback, preferably full 1920 x 1080 HD. I'll also try to find some nice background music avalable under the Creative Commons CC-BY license (which does not seem to be a trivial search).

Meanwhile, if you'd like to explore timelapse photography yourself, download the free VirtualDub software which can convert a sequence of JPEG files into video, and check out the forum on Timescapes.org for discussions on techniques. You'll need a tripod of course, and your sequence of still images will turn out best if you use a remote switch that has an intervalometer (timer) function.

To avoid smoke from forest fires in California I traveled to this location at an elevation of 10,000 feet near Tioga Pass in the Sierra Nevada.

To increase the visibility of the meteors, click through to the video's Flickr page and make sure you have the HD display switched on (click on the HD symbol). Then look near the center of the right half of the video to see the most meteors.

This sequence was assembled from 517 21 megapixel photos. The rescaling down to 1280 x 720 for uploading to Flickr helps eliminate much of the noise. The photos on this night were exposed for 10 to 20 seconds at an ISO sensitivity of 3200.

This was taken on the peak night for the meteor showers, but the moon makes all but the brightest meteors difficult to see, especially at these lower resolutions.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

What paper does J.K. Rowling write on to create the Harry Potter series? What typewriter did Hunter S. Thompson use? What species of quill and what formulation of ink did John Muir and Henry David Thoreau use? If only I could have the same advantages that they had!

To make a long story short, in tests performed years ago neither professional photographers nor amateurs could distinguish between 5 megapixel and 8 megapixel shots when printed at 8" x 10" size. The industry's dirty little secret is that new cameras have are overkill for almost all photographers, and they have been for years. If you're not taking the pictures that you want, it's probably your expectations and your process that needs adjustment, not your equipment. In other words, the camera is not your most important consideration, nor is it your most important tool. You'll find that between your ears. At least I hope so. (And now that I've saved you $500-5000 in hardware upgrades, you send me my commission for that gain via Paypal.)

Now I'm going to contradict myself and give a few exceptions. First and most obviously, if you want to print a lot of photos in sizes of 40" or larger, a little more resolution than 5-8MP might help (although my 8MP files print well up to 20" x 30").

Next, I can vouch for the fact that high ISO shooting capability is one of the most important improvements that DSLRs have added in recent years, for handheld use in low light (portraits, weddings, concerts, fireworks, Chinese New Year Parade, etc.), night landscape shots (see my new night shot gallery and recent Milky Way shots on Flickr) and so on. Specifically, a friend asked me about the Canon Digital Rebel T1i/500D, and the reviews on sites such as Steve's Digicams verify that it delivers well on its promise for high ISO shooting.

If the Canon T1i had the 40D's 6.5 fps for sports (kids sports, skiing, etc.) and full 1080 resolution HD at a full 24 frames per second it would be perfect. Perhaps there will be a "60D" update to the 50D which adds these features. There's a show in September where new models are often introduced, and if we're lucky, the 50D replacement could be shipping by Fall.

In the meantime, the Canon T1i is a reasonable upgrade for indoor, sports and outdoor low light shooting.

Whatever you do, consider setting aside some budget for the Canon TC-80N3 Remote Timer Switch, which will allow you to do time lapse photography (including of the earth rotating under stars at night with high ISO shooting). There are a number of programs that will enable you to combine a series of downsized JPG still frames to make an HD movie. One nice benefit is that you can run the individial frames through a batch editing program like Adobe Lightroom so you can efficiently do a ton of edits and enhancements and have the video turn out with stunning quality.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

While hurling through space, the earth slams into a piece of debris from the Comet Swift-Tuttle (top right) during the annual Perseid Meteor Shower, as an orange moon rises through smoke from California's forest fires to shine on the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest at an elevation of 10,000 feet in the White Mountains.

One theory behind how life could spread among the stars is that amino acids could arrive on comets and survive the impact. It seems fitting to be among earth's oldest living things to witness comet debris falling to earth under the light of our neighboring stars.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

If you can find a patch of sky with minimal light pollution, the peak showers happening midnight to 5am tonight (Wed), and they'll continue at a declining rate for a few more days. The meteors appear to come from the constellation Perseus, which is near Casseopea (looks like a big W), and rises to the East/Northeast. This article has more info:

This shot of the Milky Way over the Sierras was taken earlier in the evening. Select the photo at the top of this article to go to its Flickr page and examine the EXIF shot details (using "More Details" link in the right column).

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I'm an award-winning landscape and night photographer, workshop instructor, and author. I have been exploring the American West for four decades. I entered a career in digital imaging over three decades ago in the Graphic Printing and Imaging Division at Tektronix. I've used digital cameras close to 15 years. I am an avid traveler and prolific photographer, sharing new work daily for the past 10 years (as Internet availability allows, as I travel).

For the past five years, I have been recording my favorite 300+ locations in California from Yosemite to San Diego, to share them with you in my new book, "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South", now available in bookstores, on Amazon.com and via my blog.

Ansel Adams

Marcus Aurelius

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breath, to think, to enjoy, to love."

John Muir

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

Ansel Adams

"I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us"

Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It":

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.I am haunted by waters.”

John Muir

"You may be a little cold some nights, on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed, or at least in your grave."

Henry David Thoreau

"The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time."

Edward Abbey

“High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring”

Ansel Adams

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."

Gary Snyder

"Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness."

Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."

Georgia O'Keeffe

"Come quickly. You mustn't miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again..."